


shaking hands with other men

by endquestionmark



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 04:03:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11267556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: In November, Elizabeth Comstock became the youngest campaign manager — and the first woman — to lead a presidential candidate to the White House.





	shaking hands with other men

**Author's Note:**

> You know who you fucking are.

The first time she sees him, Elizabeth is working the convention floor, which means that all she really gets is an impression — good posture, a firm handshake, an expression of intense discomfort — and a mental note to follow up with his campaign manager about co-hosting a local event sometime late in the cycle. Booker DeWitt, elected to his second Senate term two years earlier in a sophomore surge despite a campaign apparently unconcerned with polish, looks like the kind of local figure who would neither court controversy nor interrupt their momentum. Elizabeth thinks abstractly that he would look good under a blue fall sky, clear with the last remnants of summer warmth, the leaves just beginning to change behind him and a crowd cheering before: signs in the air, hope in their throats, partisan self-righteousness buoying them up. He has the optics of an autumn person. “Pleasure to meet you,” she says, leaning heavy on the part of her accent that affords her legitimacy, flattening her vowels until they flow like syrup.

“Likewise.” He doesn’t look her in the eye. Elizabeth gets the sense that some flack stuffed him into a suit and brushed his jacket into submission and sent him out to the convention floor with about a tweet’s worth of talking points, and that DeWitt himself would rather be literally anywhere else — a point against. If he can’t fake enthusiasm, then she has no use for him. On the other hand, he has a certain rough-edged authenticity that could lend credence to the heart of their messaging. _America’s Truth_ : not perfect, but their focus group coordinators assure her that its charm is in its clunkiness. It sounds like political evangelism at its best, halfway between glossolalia and gospel. Booker DeWitt is rough-edged enough to sell it, and mannerless enough that he seems unlikely to steal the spotlight.

Elizabeth is thinking in the most self-interested terms possible, and knows it, but then again she feels like she’s been awake for something like three months straight. In reality, they’ve only been in Philadelphia for two days, with two more to go. Not an inconsiderable eternity, in political terms; by the end of the week, Elizabeth won’t even need coffee to stay awake, strung out and strung up by nerves and the desperate need to foresee every possible outcome and prepare for it. What if the monitors break, what if the balloon drop jams, what if the prompter breaks, what if the speech could still be better, what if it all falls flat? What if, when the lights come up, the floor is empty and all the delegates have gone back to their hotels and none of it is good enough? For the last seven months, Elizabeth has walked in the shadow of failure, made it her constant companion in the hope that it will become less terrifying as a result. No such luck; her job is to live in fear so her candidate can be free of it, can preach hope without hypocrisy.

“We appreciate your support,” she says, boilerplate politeness, because her job is to be unimpeachable, but if she stops moving she might fall asleep on her feet. Already Elizabeth is scanning the crowd for another hand to shake, another cluster of delegates who might take disproportionate umbrage at a perceived snub, something else to do so that, at the end of the week, she can calm the ever-present panic churning in her stomach with the thought that there was nothing more she could have done.

He looks at a point closer to her chin than her eyes. “Course.” The desire strikes her abruptly, the same kind of impulse that makes her want to break windows, go off-script and — very occasionally — hit the speaker of the House in the face until he dies. Elizabeth wants to make DeWitt look at her, grab him by the chin and force him to make eye contact. It’s about respect, not vanity. She deserves his full attention.

He, on the other hand, does not warrant hers. “Enjoy the convention,” she says, and turns away, pulling out her phone. The screen is constantly alight with notifications: emails, texts, and a half-dozen calls, at least twelve of which are from Daisy, whose approach to communication spans multiple formats and resembles nothing so much as guerrilla warfare. Elizabeth ranks them by priority, ignoring most in favor of those with the most worryingly succinct subject lines— “About nomination addr.” goes straight to the top of the list — and picks her way across the red carpet.

New York’s delegates have front-row placement in a side section to make up for their exile to the nosebleed seats four years earlier; South Dakota is further from the center, placed stage-left in front of Maine in hopes that some of the conservatism will bleed over, and Maryland is on the other side of the floor entirely; divide and conquer. Elizabeth shouldn’t need to visit their home delegation more than once over the course of the week, since they’ll have the honor of putting their own candidate over the top and formally nominating him as the future of the party, a modern founder, so she may as well get it over with.

“Ms. Comstock,” he calls after her, no hardness to the sibilants at all. Most of the men present would make a point of calling her _Miz_ , establishing conservative bona fides and old-fashioned genteel chauvinism in one fell swoop. The fact that DeWitt hasn’t cultivated an accent to go with his optics is more interesting than Elizabeth would like it to be, and speaks of the same lack of refinement that suffused his campaign; she looks over her shoulder. “Congratulations.”

Because she is certifiable — because she spends her entire life sprinting in pursuit of ever more rarefied air, with the knowledge that nothing will ever be enough; because she can barely remember the last two years of fundraising and organization and positioning; because she has put her entire life to the grindstone of the election cycle — Elizabeth wants to say: _For what?_

Her job is to be in eight places at once, to foresee every outcome, to be better than perfect. Her job is to control an infinite number of variables towards a single outcome that, on some days, seems impossibly far-off. Her job is to change the world. Why would getting a candidate nominated count for anything, next to that?

But DeWitt is looking right at her, for once, not past her or through her, and to her surprise Elizabeth is touched. “Don’t say that just yet,” she says. “But thank you.”

The moment passes. The crowd surges around them, the noise level rises, the New York delegates begin to show signs of life and interest. Elizabeth does not reciprocate. Their chances of turning New York red are nonexistent, and she has so much left to do before the night is over. She should be backstage; she should be with her team.

His eyes linger, nevertheless, even when Elizabeth is alone in the maze of hallways behind the set. Her heels click on concrete, then thud on carpet; someone has arranged vinyl armchairs and sofas in a room within sprinting distance of the stage, and Elizabeth sinks into one, hissing with relief. Every single curve in her spine feels as if it’s been beaten out with a hammer, worn thin and ready to snap. She slides down until her chin is on her chest and finishes sorting through notifications, responding to the truly urgent and delegating the rest to a range of aides and communications staff whose job is to act as human Kevlar, distributing the impact of running a national campaign so that all Elizabeth has to content with is bruising and internal bleeding rather than anything that might actually cause permanent damage.

She just has to keep in mind what it’ll be like on Thursday, when the last lines of a speech that has been proofread and focus-tested and rehearsed within a quarter-inch of its life are echoing in the hall and the lights are coming up and the balloons are falling, the safety pyrotechnics and the music and the roar of the crowd. Elizabeth has to remember how the noise will lift her, the swell of it like a wave far out in the sea, a surge of history cresting through the hall. For three minutes, maybe five, maybe ten, she won’t be tired or sore or nervy; the world will love what she loves. It will feel all right to believe in politics as an agent of change, to take her job as seriously as she does, to have no life outside of it.

Before she gets up, Elizabeth notes down DeWitt’s office number with a reminder to set up an availability later in the season. She adds a memo about his strengths — optics, laconicism — and his weaknesses — tact, apparently, and finesse — rolls her neck one last time, and hurls herself back out onto the floor and into the fray.

 

* * *

 

After the doldrums of late summer, October — the last few weeks of the month — is always a little bit like magic. The temperature comes down, the sky clears, the optics are unbelievable, and Elizabeth sits on marble steps behind the first rally of the day — at a college in New Hampshire, dozens of students and beautiful background architecture — and works on a laptop with all the paint chipped off the command key. The leaves are beginning to turn, like a fire beginning to catch, and in twenty minutes they’ll be on the bus heading for Kinderhook, where there are enough local conservatives to justify the detour and enough local color to make for a flattering ideological portrait.

Some places have bones, history dating back to the Dutch and ghosts to match; Columbia County carries the kind of weight and gravity that comes from an accumulation of stories, centuries of births and deaths. She checks her watch: ten minutes until they wrap up, thirty seconds to get off the stage, seven minutes to cross campus, another thirty seconds to get everybody onboard the bus, leaving two minutes in case of emergency or unforeseen traffic on the I-90 or particularly slow tollbooth operators. They should be in Kinderhook with an hour to go before the event, just long enough for dinner with NY-19’s own representatives and anybody else who turns up for a handshake and a photo op, and then Elizabeth can spend a peaceful hour pacing in neurotic circles and watching the clock to make sure they leave enough time for the twenty-minute drive to Spencertown: two minutes for photos on the steps of the church, three minutes for remarks to the embeds, and then the rest of the evening is out of her hands.

The sermon is a good idea, an eleventh-hour reminder of the disinterest in secular politics that will win them the Bible Belt in two weeks and the social conservatism that will carry them over the 270-vote mark before midnight, but Elizabeth has to worry about it anyway. The church only accommodates 200 attendees, so press have to hold in the parking lot, which won’t win the campaign any favor, but they might be able to make up for it with a few questions on the front steps before the event starts, and God, have they confirmed the time and venue for dinner? Have they double-confirmed?

Daisy texts her back immediately. _Yes,_ she writes. _Wrapping up in five. Where are you?_

She turns up thirty seconds later with a pack of cigarettes she clearly stole from an intern and a novelty lighter with a deer on it. “Is that Bambi?” Elizabeth asks.

“You know who Bambi is?” Daisy sits down next to her, and then gets up and sits further downwind. “Not just as target practice?”

“Very funny.” Elizabeth looks up at the click of the lighter, still typing. “And I’m familiar with the theory, yes.”

Daisy smiles. When they first started working together, she had a frictionless quality acquired as a bulwark against the endless pettiness and backbiting of Washington, laminate armor to offset the pre-baked attacks and assumptions that accompanied her every move. She still has it, as does Elizabeth, as does every woman in politics, everybody who is not afforded immediate respect and legitimacy, the confidence and acknowledgement inherent to a handshake between white men with class rings and pedigrees and enough dogmatic legacy to choke the Potomac, but the campaign trail is an unparalleled equalizer. The relentless pace of appearances and interviews and minor crises wears on everybody at the same rate, leaving them disoriented and exhausted, skin abraded down to raw nerve, and so the smile Daisy gives Elizabeth in August is entirely different from the one she wore in April of the previous year when they announced, a grey Easter overshadowed by clouds until the sun broke through like a new world waiting to be built. Back then, she smiled like a glossy brochure. Watching the clock with a cigarette in hand and the first dry leaves tumbling across the grass, her face is lit by a certain run-down mania, the exhilaration of the race.

“Do you ever think about what it’ll be like?” Elizabeth says, because that kind of euphoria is catching.

Daisy shakes her head, exhaling smoke. “Never,” she says. “I don’t have time. How about you?”

“No, me neither.” Two minutes to go. Daisy is already halfway done with her cigarette; Elizabeth shuts her laptop down so it can spend a precious ten minutes cooling down before she powers it back up on the bus. “I keep trying, but—” She makes an abortive, abstract gesture. “Nothing. I mean, I know how it would work, and I know what we’d have to do next, but no — I just can’t imagine.” Ten seconds tick by: the roar of applause and cheering, still one more paragraph to land before they clear the stage. Her laptop drive hums to a halt. “I don’t think I’d know how to feel at all.”

The campaign trail does that, makes it seem all right to be appallingly honest, to say out loud thoughts that are meant to be whispered at three in the morning over a shared hotel pillow when the air conditioning breaks and the heat is too oppressive to sleep, even with all the windows open and fans sent up from housekeeping. Politics at its best is like a chisel to the chest, like cracking open one’s ribs and admitting that some things are still worth believing in; sleepover secrets on a national stage, dressed up in bunting and arranged into talking points. Even with that permission, Elizabeth finds herself unable to speak in definite terms — even though the polls are favorable, even though their internal surveys have them three points up from the public data, even though barring some eleventh-hour catastrophe the outcome is already certain — just in case. She exists in the infinite liminal space between _could_ and _did_. The future has yet to arrive; Elizabeth refuses to anticipate it.

She stands up and reties the belt of her coat. Daisy grinds her cigarette out underfoot. “Almost there,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Kinderhook is the kind of small town that exists to give novelty font designers a reason to live. The village itself is tiny, bordered by a tributary of the Hudson and populated with almost as many monuments as it is people; the town is the largest in the county, and full of names that make Elizabeth wonder if she should have learned Dutch as a prerequisite to visiting authentic small-town America. They give Lindenwald a pass — better not to pay too much tribute to the seminal influence behind the current opposition party — and instead dine at the county historical society, or rather the candidate does, while most of the staffers are packed off to terrorize a local diner’s supply of caffeine and protein and Elizabeth annexes an administrative room out of the caterers’ way to pace and fuss and wish she still smoked.

The walls are lined with paintings, several of Martin van Buren, whose hairline Elizabeth reflexively demeans; from a series of booklets waiting to be folded, she gathers that Washington Irving spent some time committing literary terrorism in the vicinity; before long, however, and despite her best efforts, she runs out of scenery with which to preoccupy herself and begins to self-cannibalize in search of other entertainment. With few other distractions, Elizabeth considers everything that could go wrong in the scant time before polls open on Election Day: a stock market collapse, a sex scandal, the ever-present threat of a meteor strike, which might be a mercy compared to the other options, as it would render moot any requirement for crisis management. She checks her phone, and finds it — of course — uncooperative. Within the space of ten seconds, she checks it twice more to no avail. Faced with a choice between tending her array of neuroses and seeking entertainment elsewhere, Elizabeth forces herself to loosen her white-knuckled grip and go out into the hallways, the closed exhibits, as if she too might fall asleep to wake upon a green knoll to find the future already before her, and her fears in the past.

The Columbia County Historical Society building itself feels like history, with its dark hallways, its retrofitting lighting and wide doorways, the single floor of windows and the second floor in perpetual twilight. The low ceilings make Elizabeth, no giant in heels, feel like an outsized modernity in a space never meant for her, and the exhibits fill her with a peculiar sadness. The meaning, the significance, is all genuine; the blank-eyed mannequins in period dress and the amateurish staging make her feel unbearably faddish, a city girl coming into these people’s homes to ask for their belief and their hope and their love with no idea what any of it means. _What a place this could be,_ Elizabeth thinks, and the _could_ is what hooks her, evoking a dreadful mix of pity and affection, _if only it had more money, more visitors,_ but then it wouldn’t be real. Just like Elizabeth, a non-person, a passing ship, a negative space: to be memorable, it has to be inadequate, and Elizabeth pays for her competence with invisibility.

She leaves the second floor — Civil War dioramas, a tattered flag with only 35 stars, color-blocked walls and furniture arranged to occupy preexisting space, rather than establishing a setting of its own — and makes her way down the stairs, one hand on the balustrade, wincing at the noise she makes on the wooden steps. The first room she goes into seems to be an exhibit of furniture. Without the lights on, the stenciled title on the wall is unreadable, and so instead Elizabeth moves through the twilight, the shadows cast by the streetlights and the pillar lamps on the steps outside, and tries to imagine who might have used the spindly chairs, the corner tables and vanities, who might once have moved through the space and occupied it, not a mere visitor like herself but a person fitted to it like a hand to a glove, and then she looks up and sees a shadow in the doorway, wedged against the jamb, and the illusion shatters.

“Ms. Comstock,” he says, and God help her, Elizabeth knows him by voice, by shape, the slant of his shoulders and the set of his feet. The only alteration is his posture; in the evening dimness, DeWitt seems less concerned with avoiding her eyes, and so there is a hint of parade rest to his bearing.

“Senator DeWitt.” She rests her fingertips on the back of a chair that has more of a place in history than she ever will. “Is dinner over already?”

He steps into the room, into the same shadows. “Skipped coffee,” he says. “Do you smoke?”

“Only on special occasions,” Elizabeth says. “And when I’m drunk.”

“Must be tough, when you need to get out of a fancy dinner.” He remains, is the only word for it, in the corner by the door. Elizabeth exhales sharply.

“I never need to get out of a fancy dinner. More often I’m trying to inflict them on everybody else.” She gives him a wry smile, though he almost certainly can’t see it. “Apologies, Senator. That includes this one.”

He nods, slow and even. “No need.”

“And I’m not at the table because they don’t need me,” Elizabeth goes on, because something inside her is wound so tight that if she doesn’t keep talking, the mechanism will whirl out of control, go haywire and scythe through her like a razor-edged flywheel. “Or they shouldn’t, this close to the election, and my top aide strongly hinted that if I didn’t make myself scarce I would spook the cattle and stampede the candidate, so here I am. One Judas steer, relegated to tourist duty until the bus is back from Spencertown. Are you going to the sermon?”

DeWitt laughs, or something like it, a rueful noise meant only for himself. “No, ma’am.”

He doesn’t elaborate. Elizabeth remembers, abruptly, one of the few moments that had stood out from his re-election campaign, a halfhearted debate where the local challenger had pushed him on his faith, and the moderator had turned to him, ironic smile firmly in place, and said, “For the record, Senator DeWitt, do you have a soul?”

“Well, I’m running for office, aren’t I.” Laughter from the audience, a few handclaps. When it died down — a grainy video a few of the interns were watching over lunch, salad at their desks, diet soda — his voice, again: “Look, I have just as much of a soul as any of you, and if you come up with way to measure that then I’d be more than happy to oblige.”

So — lapsed, with the kind of God-fearing humility that lets him crack jokes and get away with it long enough to win a second term, at least; happier, no doubt, with his faith — or likely lack thereof — no longer a subject of public scrutiny. Elizabeth has more than enough to do without puzzling together DeWitt’s pieces, the rare scraps of authenticity that slip through, or are outlined by publicist-mandated negative space, but she nevertheless persists. “Neither am I,” she says. “I don’t think I could hide my phone in the hymnal without getting some stern looks.” Also, she doesn’t believe, but Elizabeth thinks she might not have to say it out loud for DeWitt to understand.

He inclines his head, and seems to be considering something for a moment before he says: “Supposing I went back in there and found a bottle — of wine.”

The question mark is unspoken; wine is not what DeWitt would pick if he were drinking alone. Elizabeth folds her arms, and waits.

“You’ve got nowhere to be as long as that church is full, and you aren’t due to take off for Michigan until the morning,” he says. “And you look like you could use a smoke.”

“With all due respect, Senator, a bottle of wine on the back steps is hardly a special occasion,” Elizabeth says.

“Fair enough,” he says, already turning away, and Elizabeth thinks, _God damn it_ , and God damn her, but she wants to take it back already. She wonders if he felt the same way, watching her pivot on the convention floor, if he couldn’t help calling out after her. Her voice sticks in her throat, and by the time she gets it free, DeWitt is gone as easily as he came, and there it is, the danger of the campaign trail, the hazard of being so high-strung that the slightest touch sets her singing. If Elizabeth is nobody, then she can do anything, have anything, want anything. She does.

The caterers have cleared out of the kitchen, for the most part, and nobody pays much attention when Elizabeth clatters in and starts going through carts, sorting through red and white and sparkling and then, finally, at the bottom of a half-broken down cardboard box, finds what she’s looking for: rye whiskey, unpretentious, the kind of liquor Elizabeth hasn’t drunk since she was a junior staffer, all poorly fitted skirts and patent heels. There are no glasses, because everything is cut-glass and has been pressed into service for dinner, but Elizabeth finds a stack of plastic cups under the sink and pulls two loose, scattering the rest and closing the cabinet on the mess, because what if DeWitt is gone already? What if he isn’t on the back steps, what if he’s had second thoughts — but he is, jacket unbuttoned and tie loose, and he looks up and squints when she opens the door, and Elizabeth thinks, _oh, hell,_ because her hair is in her face, and she has no free hands to fix it.

He makes space for her to sit, but more than that he takes off her jacket and shakes it out, spreads it on the step, and Elizabeth laughs out loud, an inelegant surprised bark. “There’s no need for that.”

“Call it interest,” he says. “Maybe I can bargain you up to two-thirds of a smoke.”

“There’s no need for that either.” She sits down next to him, folding his jacket in her lap, and offers the bottle, pries the cups apart with her fingernails and holds them so he can pour. Jack in a water cooler cup, like she hasn’t had in years; Elizabeth feels reckless and young and stupid in a way she never did even when she was all of those things. She holds out her hand and he taps a cigarette from the box for her, so inconsequential, so easy to take it and fall back into old bad habits, and he lights it for her as well, concentrating on holding the flame steady, and the flare almost blinds her.

She holds the smoke in her chest for a long time, letting it cool and coil, grow heavy and steady her where she sits, and then she exhales and takes a sip from the cup. Suddenly the chill of the evening becomes real, as if Elizabeth has slipped from nonexistence back into her body, overwrought nerves and overworked muscles trembling. His jacket is still on her lap.

“I won’t say anything,” DeWitt says.

She shivers anyway, keeps at it for another few minutes until he pours her a refill and she flicks the ash away to find that the cigarette is already halfway gone, and then she holds out until the ember is at her fingertips before she flicks the end away and wraps his jacket awkwardly around her shoulders. It dwarfs her, is oversized to an embarrassing degree, but the feeling — whatever it is about borrowed clothing, the unfamiliarity, the artificial intimacy — stops her shivering at once.

He affords her, at least, the dignity of not commenting on it. Instead, DeWitt just holds out the box of cigarettes and the bottle. Elizabeth sets the cup down and tilts her head. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” he says. “Does this mean it’s a special occasion?”

“I’ll take it under consideration, Senator,” Elizabeth says, because she is aware suddenly of how absurd it all must be, getting thrown out of a campaign dinner to get drunk with a congressman on the back steps of a museum. She takes another cigarette and leans in for him to light it.

“Booker’ll do,” he says, voice low, talking just to her.

The polite thing to say would be: _Call me Elizabeth._

She is not meant for politeness. Instead, she blows smoke into his face, and takes her next drink directly from the bottle.

When she hands it over, his eyes catch for a moment on the smudge of her lipstick on the glass, and then he looks at her mouth — Elizabeth knows because his gaze scrapes at her like a match, a thumbnail against her lips — and God, she’s flying, God, she’s falling, God; maybe she does know how it would feel after all.

 

* * *

 

Elizabeth works for four days straight before polls open. By the night before, election eve, her Sioux Falls hotel room is a mess of unpressed blouses left out of her suitcase so they can air, heels tipped over by the door so she can find any pair at a moment’s notice, lipstick-stained tissues littered across the vanity and so many chargers plugged into the power bar that a second surge protector has come into play. She contemplates the minibar approximately once an hour, and dismisses it just as often; she refreshes poll aggregates; she considers calling into the Situation Room to scream wordlessly at Wolf Blitzer for ten minutes or so until her blood pressure goes down. The clock ticks over to midnight and Elizabeth actually feels her heart seize, a little, at the thought that the die is cast, the Rubicon is crossed, and in less than a day the bones will fall.

The entire campaign is on lockdown after the last rally, their stateside attempt at a pre-election European media blackout. As far as the press knows, the candidate will wake up early to cast his vote and spend the rest of the day in quiet meditation with a few close friends and aides, nothing that could interrupt their momentum. As far as Elizabeth knows, he plans to spend the entire day terrorizing staffers, which shakes out to about the same thing. For herself, she intends to agonize over every second, waiting until polls close with the same trepidation, the same anticipation, as every politico in the country, every journalist, every overworked nonprofit press shop busy drafting a statement for every possible outcome. She can’t quite feel her fingertips, the combined result of stress and enough caffeine to kill an elephant, and Elizabeth blames that for why she picks up her phone, something she would kill anyone else for doing, and dials.

Somewhere between the sixth and seventh ring it dawns on her that New York is an hour ahead, one in the morning, so of course he won’t answer. Of course Booker is asleep. She feels stupid, foolish and small, for thinking otherwise, for hoping.

He picks up a moment later. Elizabeth is suddenly aware that she hasn’t taken off her makeup, and so is scrubbing at her lipstick with yet another hotel tissue, wearing it through and leaving pilled-up pigment and paper on the bathroom counter, when he says: “Hello?”

His voice is rough, the way it sounds after three cigarettes in a row. Elizabeth wipes at her mouth with the back of her hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to call so late,” she says, and grimaces at her reflection, red smeared from the corner of her lips like oil paint, a smudged Hopper. Why hasn’t she washed her face, why did she make time to change and not follow through on the rest? Not like her at all, that. Better not let it become a habit. She surreptitiously cleans her fingertips on the hem of her campaign t-shirt, red on white, black leggings.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I didn’t mean — oh, I shouldn’t have called.” She throws the tissue in the trash and peers at her reflection: the puffiness around her eyes, the telltale dullness of her skin. Elizabeth does not look like herself, the woman she knows from press shots and file photos. For a moment, the person in the mirror is not her. “Sorry to wake you up.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says. “Though I’m glad to hear it. You all right?”

Somehow it sounds like an entirely different question, put like that.

“I think so?” Elizabeth leaves the bathroom light on, but goes to pace the bedroom, the semicircle from the door to the window and back again, around the foot of the bed. Suddenly she wants to know what the world is like outside their circled wagons, their war room, their camp on the riverbank. Somewhere in the night, the newspaper presses are rumbling into action; producers are working overtime; polling stations are shuttered, waiting for sunrise. Somewhere further than that, the world of real America — whatever that means, wherever it is — turns towards day: trucks driving cross-country, night clerks and emergency room nurses, 24-hour diners and delis, cashiers and customer service representatives. Elizabeth forgets, sometimes, that anybody exists outside of politics, that most of the country has no idea who represents their district and couldn’t care less. No wonder they flock together, aides and staffers and candidates; no wonder Washington is a roiling ouroboros, from Pennsylvania Avenue to K Street and back again, private and public sector like two sides of the same coin. Nobody else understands. Nobody else can keep up. “Tell me what it’s like where you are,” she says, on impulse. “I don’t even know what day it is anymore.”

Booker snorts, because of course she does, but then he tells her: the leaves have changed, red-gold around the Capitol, and the grass is going yellow; Lafayette Park is full of chrysanthemums, a conflagration of orange, and the sky is beginning to burn out, low rippling cloud that catches the sunset and reflects it back; the wind is picking up—

“—so better make sure you have a good coat for Thursday,” he says, and Elizabeth realizes that she’s holding her breath.

“Why Thursday?” she says, though she knows the answer.

“Just in case.” Another half-truth. “Maybe a scarf.”

“I don’t wear scarves.” They end up covered in lipstick and tangled in her hair.

“Suit yourself,” Booker says, like he doesn’t understand but doesn’t mind either, and Elizabeth wants to say: _Maybe if you gave me one._ “How about turtlenecks?”

“Not if I can help it. What are you, my consultant now?”

“Just trying to get a picture.” The window casts a chilly light, all early morning blue and fading streetlights, and Elizabeth shivers and goes to sit on the bed, pulling the covers over her lap. “Who knows, it might be a sunny day if you’re lucky.”

“Now you’ve done it,” she says, and it isn’t professional, not at all, but she runs her thumb along the seam of her leggings, shivers again. “Not likely.”

“Well, you can’t borrow my jacket again,” Booker says, reasonable, “because you never gave it back in the first place.”

 _God, I didn’t,_ Elizabeth remembers. “You never asked.”

“Seemed like it might be rude.”

“What a gentleman.” Voice low, hand sliding lower; she shouldn’t; she wants. “You’d better hope I’m in town soon, in that case.”

“I do.”

She listens to his breathing on the line for a moment, another, a minute in all, tracing her thumbnail along the crease of her thigh and her hip, and it’s all so predictable. Late nights, long hours; no doubt a therapist would have a field day with all of it, and yet none of that does anything to lessen the thrum of her body, her want, her need.

“Good night, Booker,” she says, eventually, and he — clears his throat, perhaps, makes some low rough noise, something Elizabeth can’t give back, knowledge she can’t return: the way he sounds late at night, too tired to bother with decorum; the way he might have sounded if she had pulled his head down that night on the campaign trail and bitten his lip as she so desperately wanted to, left her lipstick smeared on his mouth instead of wishing him a good night and closing the door; the way he might still sound if she, if she — bites the inside of her cheek, so she doesn’t say anything else.

“Night,” he mumbles, and Elizabeth hangs up because she is terrified of herself, the new uncertain voracity of wanting for selfish reasons only, and she throws her phone against the pillows and dives for her suitcase, where his jacket remains — crumpled under makeup cases and their spilled contents — before she can think better of it.

Whatever it was that night that stopped her shivering — the unfamiliarity, the weight of the fabric, its mismatched size — it retains its potency, lending her just enough dignity, or something like it, that Elizabeth doesn’t feel absurd when she kicks off her leggings, pulls off her shirt, and drapes Booker’s jacket around her shoulders.

She wishes she had a mirror, to see what she looks like, to see what he would see, but maybe it’s better that she has to imagine it. Her lipstick is still smeared and her hair is wild, no doubt, a dark snarl against the covers by the time she gets around to touching herself and not simply sitting still, feeling her way back into her own body. Elizabeth is far too tired for it to be good, more a matter of reflex than enjoyment, but the kick and pull, the jolt of orgasm, is made unfamiliar and therefore more potent by the pedantic dirtiness of wearing his clothes. She thinks about not telling Booker or, worse, telling him, waiting until she has him in her bed or, oh: her office, his, anywhere. It doesn’t matter as long as she has Booker pinned beneath her, all his poor-fitting civility peeled back so she can be at home in her own skin, so she can whisper it into his throat like a curse, and there it is, the second time. A jolt of genuine pleasure, a violent delight that knocks her back into herself — there it is.

Elizabeth drifts for a few hours, satisfied and lax with exhaustion, but never quite manages to fall asleep. Dawn is breaking in the east by the time she gets up, limbs unspooled and heavy, to wash her face and turn out the light. She feels drunk with exhaustion and purpose, every step bringing her closer to whatever comes next, and she can almost see it, far-off and new, coming with the sunrise like a first hint of winter in the air, buoying her up and emptying her out. It feels like victory; it feels like freedom; it leaves her cold and clean and clear — a distant line of whitecaps, the tide turning far out at sea — and Elizabeth gets dressed, and waits for the future to arrive.

 

* * *

 

**_Is Elizabeth Comstock the White House’s top asset or a ticking bomb?_ **

_Staffers say the long-time aide’s role is equal parts acolyte, fixer and liability_

++

_In November, Elizabeth Comstock became the youngest campaign manager — and the first woman — to lead a presidential candidate to the White House._

_Comstock, who is now White House chief of staff, took the reins of her first national campaign before her thirtieth birthday. As a result of her meteoric rise from relative obscurity, she has faced almost unparalleled scrutiny, garnering the kind of interest typically reserved for members of the first family. Detractors say she is the stifled canary in the coal mine of modern conservatism, citing her unmarried status and apparent disinterest in “family values,” a euphemistic phrase deployed by almost all of her critics. For many of the same reasons, admirers say Comstock is the future of the Republican Party._

_While Comstock declined multiple interview requests, a handful of staffers and associates offered descriptions of the newly minted chief of staff. Their accounts painted an incomplete, and at times contradictory, portrait of the power behind the Resolute desk. Almost all requested anonymity in order to speak candidly about an aide renowned for the remarkable degree of privacy she maintains even under the national spotlight._

_One colleague characterized Comstock as a ruthless careerist, a lifelong politico who “would knife her best friend for a shot at the top.” Another implied a more sympathetic motive to Comstock’s ambition, pointing to her work for a series of nonprofits and local causes as a gubernatorial staffer._

_Whatever the cause, all agreed that Comstock is extraordinarily driven, a quality she expects those around her to match. A former campaign staffer claimed that Comstock often reduced interns to tears, insisting that they keep the same hours as senior aides, and appeared unaware of the toll it took on less hardy political novices._

_A source close to Comstock disputed that account._

_“She cares,” that source said. “For her, that means making sure nobody has any regrets when push comes to shove. She doesn’t want anybody to feel like they could have done more.”_

_Even her advocates, however, concede that Comstock has a long memory when it comes to slights and often takes a transactional approach to righting perceived wrongs. In a rare broadcast interview in April, Comstock demonstrated a surprising chilliness toward fellow Republicans who spoke out against the child care legislation that she reportedly promoted to its eventual status as a landmark campaign promise. House Speaker Andrew Ryan (R-WI), whose approval rating dipped by almost three points after he refused to commit to the bill, made a shock turnaround in August, when a Republican victory seemed inevitable, and co-sponsored the revised legislation currently being considered by the Senate. Several Ryan aides credited Comstock with that sudden change of position, and one top staffer called it “evidence of her ability to conjure an obsessive animus toward almost anyone, seemingly at will.”_

_Among those exempt from Comstock’s antipathy are fellow West Wing employees who came on board in the early days of the campaign, such as White House press secretary Daisy Fitzroy. Reached through her office, Fitzroy also declined to be interviewed for this story._

 

* * *

 

“She cares,” Elizabeth says, leaning up against the wall in Lower Press and blocking the briefing room door. “Cares? Really?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Daisy says, in a tone of voice that means she definitely does, “and I’m about to be late.”

“ _Cares,_ ” Elizabeth repeats. She crosses her arms.

Daisy makes a half-hearted attempt to shoulder past her. “Do you want to have this conversation in front of the entire press corps? Because if you make me late, that’s what’s going to happen.”

“I just can’t believe you said I _care._ ”

“I feel like you should be more worried that somebody — and for the record I have no idea who that could be — is going on the record as a anonymous source,” Daisy says. “Not that your reputation isn’t important too. Just saying.”

Elizabeth shrugs. “I trust their judgement.”

“And I can’t believe you said _that._ ” Daisy grins. “See? Now we should both be worried. It balances out.”

Despite Elizabeth’s best efforts, her mouth twitches. “That’s terrible spin.”

“I’m getting it out of my system.” Daisy looks pointedly at the door. “Are we done?”

“We’re done for now,” Elizabeth says. “But the next time Politico calls, I’m telling them you foster orphan bunnies on your days off.”

“That’s fine,” Daisy says, sliding the door open. “I don’t have any days off!”

Elizabeth turns away, coming face-to-face with a half-dozen reporters lingering in the hallway. “That was off the record,” she says, to laughter and groans — _just one quote, Ms. Comstock, what about the tax plan? Do you have any comment on —_ and escapes to Upper Press and Daisy’s office. The sticky note with her computer password is still on the mousepad, considerably more crumpled than it was in January. Elizabeth puts it in a drawer for nominal security’s sake, though anybody who manages to decipher Daisy’s email, replete as it is with abbreviations and inside baseball jokes, probably deserves whatever they get out of it.

She walks the hallways once a day at minimum, twice if she can manage, to gauge the temperature in the building, whether pressure is building up in the rabbit’s warren of cubicles and compartments. The building is carved up to accommodate as many people as possible, with comfort a secondary concern; on the floor plan, most offices are indistinguishable — in terms of square footage and dignity — from the foyer of the first-floor women’s room. Most staffers still don’t seem to know the latter exists. Living in each other’s pockets like that would drive most coworkers to homicide, but the communications team is still preoccupied with figuring out how to order lunch to the office, so Elizabeth would guess she has at least a year before she needs to start running interference on that front.

It still feels unreal, every part of it. Less than two months in, and Elizabeth feels like only a week has gone by since she sat in the miserable January cold, the dome of the Capitol a bulwark against the indifferent sky, watching a chapter of her life — an entire volume — come to a palpable close. Afterwards she had been herded off to take a bus to the White House, just like that. Her coat was nowhere near heavy enough to keep her warm through more than an hour of inactivity, and so she was shivering when Booker caught her by the elbow and pulled her out of the throng of senior staff, said, “I know you’re busy.”

“Not as busy as I’ll be in an hour,” she said, not an attempt at humor but he laughed anyway. His breath was like smoke between them; Elizabeth realized with a start that he was smiling in an uncomplicated way she had never seen before, and that it made him handsome. “You must be cold.”

“You weren’t joking about the scarves,” he said, instead of answering, but by then Daisy was making noises about leaving Elizabeth behind if she didn’t get moving, so she didn’t understand what he was doing until her hands were full of wool.

“What?” she said, stupid with cold and unexpected contact, the press of his hands against hers through bunched fabric, but by then he was gone, lost in the swirl of identical black peacoats and overcoats, and Daisy was pulling Elizabeth away by her belt.

“Don’t think I’m not going to give you the third degree about that later,” she said, and Elizabeth — still bemused — stumbled after her, carrying the scarf in her hands like an idiot. It was worn, grey and faded red, and warm. “Well, are you going to put it on?”

She had left it in a desk drawer for a week after that before sending it out for dry cleaning, a decision which gave her no small amount of agony, and then folded it over a hanger in her closet, and Daisy had never subjected her to the promised interrogation.

Pausing in front of the Palm Room door, one of the few spaces where she has room to think and not just react, Elizabeth suspects that it’s just as well. She has a fair idea what Daisy would ask, but no idea how she would reply; more to the point, she has no idea what any of it means, the scarf, the cigarette, God, the jacket, how could she forget that? On the same hanger as the scarf, even, pushed to the back of her closet behind the first off-the-rack suit she bought as a college graduate, still in the plastic sleeve from the cleaners’ and Elizabeth knows that she has to give it back, but Booker hasn’t asked. She wants him to ask. She wants him to keep asking, question after question, laying down his coat, his armor, a piece at a time, one step after another, so that her answer is an inevitability rather than a revelation.

Most of it is in her head, of course. Most things are, these days, policy and plans and a calendar that runs until Congress’ summer recess; Elizabeth thinks in two-month arcs, playing out every tiny detail into its possible reverberations further down the line. She could visit his office, probably, take a car to the Russell building and catch him before he heads out to vote. She could contact his chief of staff and set up a meeting. She could even call him, like a normal person, but that isn’t how they work or who they are.

Inactivity is anathema to Elizabeth. Her reflexive tendency is to overcorrect, she knows, but the alternative is doing nothing and letting annoyance calcify into intractability. There is a file among her papers, with a nondescript cover sheet and a number of subheadings, the usual burial by bureaucracy of any document that is even vaguely significant: the product of that same combined paranoia and boredom on the campaign trail.

August on the road had been slow, even by political standards, an endless becalmed space as Congress headed out of town and the campaign did its best to fend off the inevitable silliness of late summer, reporters scraping the bottom of the barrel for news breaks and voters wearying of the interminable election cycle. By September, Elizabeth was itching for something to do: a minor scandal to squash, a 24-hour crisis to manage, anything. The air conditioning in the field office strained to keep up with the heat, even as the sun went down, and Elizabeth ran through their schedule for the thousandth time and stewed; Daisy stood in the doorway of her borrowed office, iced coffee in one hand and a clipboard in the other, reading out a list of state politicians who hadn’t yet appeared on the trail with them, and Elizabeth interrupted, “What about DeWitt?” and instantly regretted it.

Daisy checked the list. “Nothing yet. We can set something up over the recess if you want?”

“No, not yet,” Elizabeth said, and felt it rising again, the urge to treat everyone as an adversary, down to and including herself. “Vet him.” Idle hands and idle thoughts; something about DeWitt set Elizabeth’s teeth on edge, though she didn’t know why and had spent more time trying to understand than she would prefer to admit. Talking to him felt like putting on tights with a ragged fingernail, like something would tear if she pulled too hard.

Daisy made a note. “For what?”

What Elizabeth really found unbearable was the delicacy of it all, the way she wanted to take care, and so she said, “Everything.”

“Everything?”

“Vet him like he came out against Tenenbaum-Ryan and we want to primary him with extreme prejudice.” She stabbed her pen into the calendar block on the desk, still open to March.

“Any reason?” Daisy said, eyebrow raised.

“Just gut instinct.” Elizabeth had no reason beyond wanting to know enough to destroy DeWitt, if it came to that, and if it never did, she would still have him in her pocket. If she was certain of anything, it was that everyone had secrets they thought could destroy them, and DeWitt struck her as a man with more skeletons in his closet than most.

“All right,” Daisy said. “Give me a week.“

At the time — uncertain of success, caught in the weightless, infinite span of the season — Elizabeth thought that Daisy was a very good staffer, and an even better strategist. _If the whole presidency thing doesn’t work out, some congressman with an eye for talent will steal her_ , she thought, maybe for a gubernatorial campaign, and Elizabeth wouldn’t see her again until they ran into each other backstage at a primary debate, backing different candidates in another iteration of the same race, always another election. Until then, Elizabeth knew she could count on Daisy for discretion, but more importantly for competence. “Thank you,” she said, and sighed. “That’s it for tonight, I think.”

The file was informative, if unsurprising, when it materialized — DeWitt’s vices ran to drink and pugilism, old standbys for a onetime soldier, though all seemed long buried — though Elizabeth was unsurprised to see there were gaps in his past that Daisy had been unable to fill in. Some correspond with her own blank spaces, Adam’s rib relocated, and others make her feel hollow, as if she’s doing everything wrong, living her life in bas-relief with no depth or substance. Some raise questions she has no interest in answering. Nobody comes to Washington to discover themselves; Elizabeth has long since resigned herself to being more war zone than woman. Her damage is fundamental and formative; no amount of deconstruction or self-examination can change that, and she wouldn’t want it to anyway. She is a singularity.

Back at her desk, in her closet of an office, Elizabeth leafs through the pages, dog-eared from getting carted through every state in the Union in a file box. It strikes her again, the odd tenderness of watching a lit window across the street, borrowing someone else’s everyday worries and sorrows to populate her own nonexistent home life. Reading through a file of opposition research is the closest she gets to experiencing it for herself: the singular wistfulness of somebody who habitually cooks for one, who never expects anybody else to see the inside of their home; the practiced solitude of someone who has made peace with it. Elizabeth herself has no time to be lonely, let alone get used to the idea. She suspects it comes with time, like the growth of scar tissue, the slow calcification of empty space.

She wants to shatter it, of course, to disrupt whatever comfortable loneliness Booker has cultivated. The nature of the operative is to operate, to upset, to act as a catalyst, remaining unchanged amidst reaction. Elizabeth has a persistent fantasy in long meetings and on rough nights: she pictures taking the dishes from the drying rack next to her sink and smashing them, one at a time; against the cabinets, the floor, the faucet, the walls. She imagines the ringing of broken china, the fine dust, the glossy shards littered around her feet, and is centered by it.

Elizabeth stays in her office for so long, working so she doesn’t have time to think, that Daisy comes to turf her out eventually. The sun is long since set and votes are over for the evening, but Elizabeth is still waiting — for what? A sign, maybe, one that comes in the form of a gift bag; Daisy holds it out in silence.

“What’s this?” Elizabeth says, unsure how to react and defaulting to apprehension. Daisy just gestures with increasing vehemence until Elizabeth takes the bag, and pokes around in the tissue paper until she finds a card — stuffed down next to the bottle, nothing special, but wine is wine — and looks at it uncomprehending for a moment before she realizes.

“Happy birthday,” Daisy says, with a healthy helping of amusement but no pity, thank God, and grins. “You had no idea.”

“None at all.” Elizabeth pulls the bottle halfway out of the bag. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Daisy looks at the clock. “Heading out soon?” Elizabeth shrugs. “You should get some rest.”

“So should you.” The exchange is familiar, a well-worn ritual from late nights on the road and during the transition; such customs keep the lights on in the office as much as any donor list, any number of fundraisers, any field operation. Daisy might go to dinner, but her phone will buzz irritably in her bag until the plates are cleared. All the junior staffers might be warming seats at bars for ten miles around, overstaying their welcome from happy hour and making precisely no new friends, but not one of them knows how to leave work at the office. Over in the residence, the President is leafing through enough briefing binders to reforest the entire northwest. When Elizabeth leaves — she’ll find something to do, but the job goes with her, no matter what, no matter where. “Thank you again. I’ll be sure to make time to drink this, if nothing else.”

“You better,” Daisy says, grinning, and closes the door on her way out. The noise sends a railroad spike through Elizabeth’s skull, a sharp bright bloom of pain; she massages her temples and tries unsuccessfully to focus on the opposite wall. Pain comes in starbursts behind her forehead, the fever-heat of eye strain combined with too much coffee and too little sleep, and she makes a mental note — the latest of many — to make an appointment with her optometrist. She missed the past three, but maybe the fourth time will be the charm. Maybe she won’t have an intern make the cancellation call while she sits through endless meetings, one delayed after another by the crisis of the morning. Elizabeth can dream.

She looks at the bottle of wine, then the clock, then through the clock. She thinks about going back to her apartment and hunting down a corkscrew and drinking her birthday present while watching CNN. If she happens to be lucky, AC360 will be running a feature on refugee camps or some similarly relaxing subject. If not, Elizabeth will watch with a glass in one hand and a legal pad in the other, taking notes to hand off in the morning to whichever junior staffer looks most relaxed.

She looks again at the drawer where the file is, where the scarf was, and taps her fingernails on the desk — against her phone — and thinks about favors owed, one tap, two, three, the click of a lighter, and then she picks it up and dials.

Booker lives on a quiet tree-lined street. At first, Elizabeth thinks he must be asleep — a few windows remain alight close to the corner, but his are dark — until she catches a glint of reflected light from somewhere deep in the house, a door opened and shut and then the hall light comes on. She holds the wine in both hands, gift bag discarded on the floor of her car, tissue paper balled up and card stuffed into the glove compartment, and wonders if she should have gone to her apartment first to change, to reconsider, to give herself an excuse to be a sensible coward. She wonders if she should undo the top button of her blouse.

He answers the door before she can decide. Just as well; in retrospect the thought seems like something she would have done a year ago, and therefore feels irredeemably childish. Elizabeth has aged a decade in a matter of months, acquiring a corresponding irritability towards anyone who hasn’t, and so she thrusts the bottle at Booker like a warrant and says: “Invite me in.”

She expects him to hesitate, to push back, at the very least to ask what the hell she thinks she’s doing, but he does none of those things — caught on the threshold like a guard dog, straining at the threshold, tenderfooted in socks and shirtsleeves — and then he steps back.

“It’s my birthday,” she says, as if that explains anything.

“Come in,” he says; so maybe it does.

His house is well-appointed, if generic: there is a touch of real money behind the upholstery, the sconces, the straightforwardness of the decor. That kind of simplicity takes commitment — probably a decorator’s, but still — and investment, the kind that a politician would usually put towards a residence elsewhere, a refuge.

There is nobody in Booker’s life. No house to call home, no family back in New York, nothing that Elizabeth could find to root him besides whatever keeps him in Washington, and only one force on earth is strong enough to do that. She sits in one of the armchairs by the empty fireplace and watches him in the kitchen, trying to divine the details of his life from the cabinets, the counter, and wondering what it is that he loves enough to stay: money, or power, or the relentless pace, or perhaps something less tangible.

He brings her a glass and sits on the sofa opposite, watching her as if waiting for her to say something, and Elizabeth takes a sip and then a breath.

“It was a present,” she says. “And I promised I’d make time to drink it, but I hate leaving bottles open and, to be frank, I prefer red.” _And I couldn’t think of anybody else._

“You look well,” he says, after a moment.

Elizabeth laughs. “Do I? I feel like I’ve aged a decade already.”

He shakes his head. “It suits you, sorry to say.”

“This is nice,” she says, gesturing vaguely at the interior with her glass. Booker looks around as if he’s never seen it before. “You must plan to be here for a while.”

“Tell you the truth, some days I don’t know why I’m here to begin with,” he says. “So I don’t know.”

“You will.” Elizabeth feels awkward in his living room, pushing his professionally curated life out of place, turning up on his doorstep like somebody who doesn’t know the rules, the niceties of how things are done.

But isn’t that what she wants, to pull him out of alignment and stabilize herself in a single maneuver? He fits in the house, domesticated by its trappings. The city is built in neoclassical style, meant to evoke a forum; Booker’s house is built like a home, meant to blunt his sharp edges and mold him into somebody who could live in it. _What a waste,_ she thinks. All he lacks is ambition — he has the right look and manner, just enough genuine ignorance of his own potential — but Elizabeth could make something of him, build something worthwhile with his hands. Killer’s hands, careful on the stem of a wineglass; steady gaze; she wants to ruin him for anyone, anything, else.

“Was that a question?” he says, and there it is, a snag; the possibility of damage, exciting and real, but also of revelation. Elizabeth’s pulse comes a little quicker.

“You tell me.”

When Booker puts his wine glass down, leaning over to set it on the coffee table, she drains her own and stands, only a little unsteady as her heels sink into the carpet. He doesn’t startle, only straightens as Elizabeth crosses to stand in front of him, and she doesn’t bother to correct her balance when she leans down to kiss him — just keeps on leaning, crosswise, until she overbalances and pulls him down as well. She loses one of her heels along the way. Before she can kick the other away, he closes his fingers around her ankle, gentle, and takes it off himself; Elizabeth waits for it to thump against the carpet, and when it never comes, realizes that Booker has set it gently next to its mate.

 _Oh,_ she thinks, as he folds her leg against the cushions; of all the qualities she expects from him, carefulness has never been one — _what are you doing, Elizabeth_ — but she knows.

 

* * *

 

For a while, Elizabeth is happy.

Afterwards, she tells herself that it was all an illusion, that she fell for one of the thousand pedestrian lies people tell themselves to keep the sun in the sky and the earth beneath their feet. _Everything will be all right. You’ll feel better in the morning. There’s somebody for everyone._ What really stings is that Elizabeth deals in lies like that, in the illusion of an unimpeachable democracy, a government either corrupt or unsullied, as needs must, so she should know better. But she doesn’t, it turns out, because she wants so desperately for it to be true. She wants to be a person, or at least to try; she wants to know and be known, to take as much joy in that as she does in her work, and for a while she does.

Time passes in snapshots, moments of true candor that seem only too reasonable at the time. Afterwards, Elizabeth can hardly bear to think about them, how unguarded she must have been, how trusting, how foolish to think it could last.

Waking up before dawn to shared warmth and the first tentative sallies of birdsong, that first morning, it doesn’t seem impossible at all. Elizabeth leaves Booker sleeping and goes to puzzle out his shower, padding naked across the hallway and feeling pleasantly unmade, and afterwards she slips back into bed with him and makes him persuade her to go another another round. It seems so easy, suddenly, to be herself — or a version of herself who gets to work with barely enough time to change into new clothes, half-falling into her closet, and can’t stop smiling — and to be happy with it.

They have a lot of early mornings, coffee at his kitchen counter, sunrise coming sooner every day, and a lot of late evenings stolen after work, but very little daylight. Elizabeth’s waking hours belong to the White House, and Booker’s to bureaucracy of a lesser order, though she has the creeping suspicion, put off as long as possible, that he would make room for her amidst his work, place her on the same pedestal as his sworn duty. She would not do the same for him; she tells him so, tired-eyed over wine at the end of a bad day, in the shower as he does his damnedest to make her late for work, in bed again, as he holds himself very still beneath her, tendons standing out in his wrists. A whole other list on its own: his likes and dislikes, his reactions, the tension he holds in his jaw and shoulders, the way it only releases when Elizabeth gives him something else to focus on. No doubt he has a similar catalog of her, all the tiny secrets it never occurred to Elizabeth to keep until they were already gone: how she looks in the morning, how she sounds at night, the way she enjoys borderline viciousness; nothing that matters, and yet enough to ruin her. It should frighten her and does not.

She gets better at her job. She learns to let new hires sink or swim on their own merits, and to step in before their mistakes can ripple out into a full-fledged disaster; she learns how to keep working when the Cold War-era email system goes inexplicably dark for hours on end; she learns how to delegate, though not very well. A series of minor controversies arise, most to do with a rogue administrative assistant who accidentally forwards an email thread containing the entire office’s March Madness brackets to a reporter. For a week, Elizabeth knows more about basketball than she ever has before, and then she forgets all of it in favor of referring requests for comment to the press office, whose job it is to come up with entertaining answers for a thousand variations of the same question. Nobody throws up on a foreign head of state or shoots a friend in the face, which is a low bar but a good one to pass.

The summer passes. Agencies start making noises about the projects they want mentioned in the State of the Union; Elizabeth starts wishing she could filter out any email with “SOTU request” in the subject line; before she knows it, November is at the gate and speechwriting has begun in earnest. She thinks of Booker rarely, but relies on him often. On the one-year anniversary, though it feels like a century since Election Day, she picks up takeout and lets herself into his house and only realizes as she opens boxes that she ordered the same thing a year ago and was too nervous to eat, picking at snow peas an hour before polls closed, absolute agony mitigated by a kind of hysterical resignation in a cycle that repeated every five minutes or so.

“So how’s it feel,” Booker asks later. Elizabeth raises her eyebrows, because she could use a little more specificity, and he returns it with deliberate obtuseness.

“All right,” she says, matching him shot for shot, and twitches her hips up against his hand. He makes an amused, exasperated noise, and she relents: “Hard to believe, at first? Like at any minute they might take it back, even after the concession, because there’s no way it’s real. It feels too easy.”

“You call that easy.”

“Well.” Her breath comes a little sharper, a little more shallow. “Yes?”

“You’re a terror,” he says, and she shoves at the sheets, pushes against his hand again; with abrupt certainty, she needs to come, needs the snarling catharsis of it.

“It wasn’t real for a second,” she says, “and then I didn’t want to let it be real, because you can’t take that back—” The flex of his wrist, the proximity, the urgency; talking is the last thing Elizabeth wants to be doing, but it pours out of her, everything she carries inside of her, everything she can’t talk to anyone else about. “—and then it was.” It wasn’t and then it was, simple as that. The world had split into before, a time that no longer existed, and after, dividing Elizabeth with it: past and present, dead and more alive than she had ever been before. She had felt like she could do anything — dream, fly, kiss a stranger, give him all her ugliness, come apart in his bed — build a future that she could live in, and walk into it open-eyed and unafraid.

She comes up gasping for air, and finds Booker stealing glances out of the corner of his eye, as if he can’t bring himself to look straight at her.

Elizabeth puts her hand on his throat, closing the circle, and makes him.

 

* * *

 

The early mornings and the sentiment, the sheer awful earnestness of it all, are what let Elizabeth pretend for as long as she does. Once or twice, watching Booker when he doesn’t know she is, Elizabeth thinks she might be able to convince herself well enough that it will become true; she wants that to be the case. She wants to tell the story well enough that it becomes moot, because that way she won’t have to wake every morning and tend to her precarious house of cards, keeping all her lies in line.

Still, she thinks for a while that she might be falling for it. Sunrise is like that: it paints the sky in impressionistic strokes, and strips away illusion all at once. Elizabeth is a creature of illusion, and so has no idea what Booker sees when he looks at her in the lengthening hours of the morning; she only knows that she feels seen and known, past all the smoke and mirrors to whatever might be accruing beneath, and likes it.

January comes and goes. The State of the Union is a shopping list, as it always is, because nobody actually wants to hear a speech. What viewers want is to be pandered to, albeit with loftier ideals than usual; what federal departments and agencies want is a presidential shout-out; what the President wants is to have a final draft so he can do a last read-through and work on delivery; what the speechwriters want is a lifetime supply of Red Bull, legal pads, and Uniball pens that won’t explode on Air Force One; what Elizabeth wants is for the whole nightmare to be over so she can go back to thinking about office feuds rather than the fact that a year has already passed and they should start coordinating re-election efforts.

And then it is, and she can’t wait for the next one, because it really is something — in the darkest season, the beginning of the long climb towards spring, the cold catabasis of the year — to sit in the gallery and listen, hand pressed over her heart as if to keep it from bursting. Like the campaign all over again, like belief, an invocation to close the old year and open the new one, and at the end of it she goes to Booker’s house and fucks him on the sofa and wakes up in his bed and turns on the shower without thinking about it. And then it is January again, August, November, January: Elizabeth has walked the same path for so long, it feels, she could walk it in her sleep. She could rise from her grave and keep walking it, one more grey ghost in the marble streets, the big empty throughways full of footfalls and devoid of people. She belongs, or rather belongs to, and it feels like a ring on her finger and a millstone hung from her neck, an albatross, the abbreviated arc of clipped pinions.

Elizabeth mistakes the early morning for love, is what she tells herself afterwards, when the sentiment and the sincerity and her hope all cave in and leave her gasping, because of course an interim implies an aftermath, and nothing in politics ends quietly when it can go on for months instead. Afterwards, a period of time which overlaps with _during_ and _before_ , she writes it off as lost time, three years’ worth of propagated error, a blank space on her résumé, something to talk around and never address directly.

The re-election campaign is going badly, is what does it in the end; Booker is running one of his own, and Elizabeth is back in the saddle because the nomination is all but guaranteed, and somewhere between the overwork and the exhilaration of recursion there is a false summer. They — Elizabeth thinks of it as the space between them, the hooks they have set in each other — are over, unmoored, and the dawning realization feels like it might be enough to save them. Everything feels new again, shot through with the previous year’s rot, but with just enough fresh growth that it might be worth saving.

She works through her birthday. Booker doesn’t call her at her office, but he cooks, a habit he’s either trying to pick up for the first time or revive from long abandonment. Neither of them says much, but the silence is not uncomfortable; it feels like the winding down of a long day, because in a month both of them will be furious, aiming to wound, but until then they are invested in the same false optimism. Neither wants to be the one to dispel the illusion. Elizabeth jokes about booking her next vacation a decade in advance, so she doesn’t have an excuse to skip it.

He suggests Paris.

Elizabeth just looks at him for a moment, and he says: “You mentioned it.”

She doesn’t remember that. There is a lot that Elizabeth doesn’t remember, that slips through the cracks, between duplicate and triplicate, but it frightens her suddenly, because Paris is one of her deeply held secrets, one of those ingrown dreams that feels too fundamental to say aloud, and if he knows about Paris, what more does she have? He has all of her: a pocket millstone, an albatross upon his eaves, a lightning strike frozen in stone in the palm of his hand.

At that moment, she understands that in order to get free she will have to leave something of herself behind, gnawing off a limb so that the whole may survive; Elizabeth realizes for the first time that she may not be better for it, and that she will always feel the absence, the negative space, even if the scar tissue is nerveless.

“You should come with me,” she says, because it will never happen and they both know it, but as long as they’re dealing in dreams: he should. Even if Elizabeth goes to Paris on her own someday, she thinks that he will still come with her, dogging her steps.

He looks the way Elizabeth feels, as if she has gutted him and yet he wants to thank her for it; his hands are still for a moment. “All right,” he says, and smiles a little, helpless and exposed. “I will.”

Elizabeth knows, then, that it has to be over.

 

* * *

 

A month later, for his birthday, she catches Booker in his office just before he would usually leave for the night, a neat piece of legerdemain which involves anticipating that he most likely plans to stay five minutes to make sure all his staff have cleared out. Elizabeth has keys to his house; she could light candles, set up dinner, whatever it is ordinary people do for personal occasions, but neither of them are the former, and therefore both of them view the latter more as currency than cause for celebration. Instead she waits until the last staffer’s footsteps have faded, and nudges the door open, fitting herself into the room before he notices.

“Happy birthday,” she says, when he closes the closet door previously blocking his line of sight, and because she can’t help it, Elizabeth adds: “Mr. Senator.”

“Elizabeth,” he says, and she tells him what she wants. When she finishes, his eyes are dark, and he looks at her with an intensity that arises from somewhere more deeply buried than arousal, closer to animal.

She tells him again. The second time, she doesn’t ask.

“Are you sure?” he says.

The third time, she makes it an order.

Booker fucks her against his desk until she sprawls out backwards, first to her elbows and then wholly, so that it scrapes against the floor with every thrust. Her orgasm is unsatisfying, a brief hot snarl of pleasure that leaves her wanting, but Booker leans into her and doesn’t let up until he gets another. The second time is better, cut through with the impending ache of overexertion, the necessary vehemence of being made to come twice without a pause to collect herself, and Elizabeth digs welts into his shoulders — never his neck, much as she would like to leave visible marks, the imprint of claws and teeth — and he follows her over, makes a sound deep in his throat that could either be pain or pleasure. The way Booker moves, the way he looks, is founded on abandon, on whatever it feels like to fuck her bare; it doesn’t do much for Elizabeth, but the way it affects him: that does.

Afterwards he pushes her until her feet are up on the desk too, so that her legs fall open and he can nose at the mess he’s made, how wet she is, how oversensitive. Elizabeth tolerates him for a moment and then pushes his head away and gets up. The sensation is — acute, uncomfortable. She can feel the difference.

Booker has a mirror in his closet, put there so he could straighten his tie before important meetings, if he ever bothered. Elizabeth swings the door open and drags a chair over so she can lounge and look at herself, blouse half-open and hair a mess, lipstick smeared at the corner of her mouth. She rubs it away with her thumb and adjusts herself, hiking one leg up so she can watch his come slide out of her and onto the leather. Between the setting and the optics — her stockings, the burnished reflections and lamplight — Elizabeth thinks that she looks like pornographic propaganda: Columbia ravished. She spreads herself with two fingers to watch more slip out, and shivers at the way it feels, a naked physical discomfort that leaves her caught between fascination and shocked, humiliated arousal. She works in the White House. She is the most powerful woman in the country. She shows Booker her wet fingertips, and says: “I’m not going back to my office like this.”

“Then don’t go back to your office.” He crosses the room and goes to one knee next to her chair. Elizabeth considers his rumpled collar, the grey at his temples; Booker has grown into the look of an elder statesman, with none of the corresponding gravitas and no interest in cultivating it. Instead, he’ll be a scrapper until he picks the wrong fight and somebody decides to have him put down. _That’ll be a shame,_ Elizabeth thinks, as he swipes his fingers through the mess of her cunt. She may be a soft touch for a fighter, but it seems like a pity to waste that kind of talent, that unteachable stubbornness. On impulse, she rests her hand on the side of his face and strokes her thumb through his hair. She can feel the clench of his jaw, the suppressed end-of-day tension that persists until she takes a tighter grip and twists, pulling his head sideways until he meets her eyes. Then it melts out of him by degrees, though enough persists that Elizabeth knows he could yank himself free if he wanted. No doubt Booker wants her to be aware of that.

Nevertheless, he lets Elizabeth push his head between her thighs, offering just enough teasing resistance to make her work for it, and then he curls his tongue into her with a single-mindedness that borders on cruelty. She still feels fucked-out and filled up, but Booker eats her out with such focus that she has to close her eyes, cheeks burning, rather than watch him. There is a terrible carefulness to his attention, a solicitude that no longer manifests as tenderness, but as thoroughness; she tries and fails to suppress a tremble, one that starts in her core and becomes a judder, an awful full-body shake.

Booker neither hesitates nor lets up, and Elizabeth digs her heels into his shoulder, his back, tightens her grip in his hair until the pain must be almost unbearable. In response, he lays his forearm across her hips and puts enough weight into it to keep her pinned, as Elizabeth finds out when she tests him. In answer he slides the pad of his thumb against her clit — a steady unmoving pressure, nowhere near enough — and she thinks: _God, the fucking audacity._ For him to know her so well, to lay claim to every part of her as she does to him, and to do it so well; if only they had been like this from the start, all directness without domestication, then perhaps they would have had a chance.

As it is, of course they don’t; Booker has a competence when it comes to obscenity, a straightforwardness that only becomes plain when stripped of sentiment. Fucking him makes Elizabeth feel like a thing of flesh and blood and skin and sweat, anchored to her body rather than her optics, though she can never quite forget them. By the time he finishes with his task and sets about the business of her pleasure, rather than her orders, Elizabeth has abandoned her opportunistic arousal — a matter of practicality, founded more on frustration and fantasy than lust — for the genuine article. He presses a perfunctory kiss to the side of his thumb, lips just brushing against her, and waits for further instructions.

Elizabeth wouldn’t mind getting fucked again, but as long as she’s indulging in fantasies, what harm can another do; why not pretend she can go home with him and have him at her leisure; why not pretend it isn’t the end, until she can no longer fool herself. In the meantime she wants to dirty him up in every way she can. She reaches down to take him by the wrist, and shoves until he gets the idea and opens her up with two fingers, three, wet with her slickness and his spit, and that reminds Elizabeth that she wants a kiss, so she pulls him up for one.

He tastes faintly of leather, rounding out the tang of metal; she realizes that he must have cleaned off the chair as well and moans into his mouth, letting her legs fall open, asking for more, more. In answer, he provides. Even at the close, he and Elizabeth fit — hook, eye — and whenever she tugs, he follows. He makes her feel present, his mouth against her collarbone, his fingers blunt and substantial. Her pulse throbs in her head and her throat and her fingertips and between her legs, and when he finally makes her come again, Elizabeth is subsumed entirely by pleasure, lost until it ebbs at last and leaves her still thrumming, still faintly alight.

“It’s _your_ birthday,” she points out presently. Booker is slumped on the sofa, licking his fingers clean, in only marginally less disarray. “You don’t have to be quite so generous.”

“I’m not.” He doesn’t look up. “Maybe this is what I want.”

Elizabeth considers whether to point out that, actually, it’s what she wants. What Booker considers a gift is in fact permission to — she can’t help the thought; it comes too easily — serve at her pleasure. What Booker wants is to follow her lead, one last time.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she says, an opening move; the last, best gift she intends to give him.

From there, everything is straightforward. They know their parts. They fight, halfheartedly, and say things they mean, and enough besides that to make sure neither of them will reconsider in a hurry.

“You’re a piece of work,” Booker says finally, a statement of simple fact, and yet one she knows will leave a mark.

Elizabeth doesn’t let herself say any of the things that would make sure he never thinks about her again without an accompanying spike of anger. That would be too easy — on her — and if Elizabeth wants to be alone again, she thinks, solitary, then she should have to work for it.

Instead, she lets him have the last word. She feels like he’s earned it.

 

* * *

 

Unmaking is the hardest part, because Elizabeth has to hold onto the certainty that Booker would not, could not act against her. She has to believe that the hooks she set, whatever it was she inspired, is strong enough for that. Trust is not in her nature, but it becomes her bulwark, and the push and pull, the inherent contradiction between reflex and pragmatism, makes her feel caught on some sort of threshold; unable to free herself, both within and without.

It takes her a moment, when she gets back to her apartment, to find the light switch. In the hall, she trips on the runner; in the kitchen, she catches her hip on the counter. Elizabeth breathes in and out, a controlled release, and tells herself to stop being ridiculous — it’s still her space, still her apartment, no matter how small it suddenly feels, how mean and closed-off — and that seems to help. She leaves her bag on the bed and tries not to count the steps from there to the bathroom, or to think about the dust on the mantel. With all the lights on, the corners seem a little less empty, and Elizabeth settles onto her sofa with wine and the resolution to not think about anything until tomorrow, when she can start paring away dead tissue, sorting her thoughts into safe and unsafe and boxing them up for a future she is determined will never arrive.

She is unused to sleeping alone, but she was unused to sharing a bed, once, so Elizabeth is sure she can break the habit. _That’s all it is,_ she tells herself, a habit like biting her nails, which she never did to begin with, or smoking, which she has never quite managed to drop, or smiling — which is another habit she’ll have to break again, a certain frankness of expression that crept up on her, slipping past years of practiced composure to leave her an open book.

Given any luck, she won’t even have to think about it. The re-election campaign is going badly. Elizabeth has more important things on her mind: how to turn around approval numbers, how to adapt a message based — ironically — on its own immutability, how to warn off the handful of primary challengers who have thrown their hats into the ring, conventional wisdom be damned. If she just throws herself into her work, then the rest should follow; it always has.

With a pang, Elizabeth realizes that it probably will, just like that, just that easily: like letting an opportunity pass, or something dear slip away, or saying goodbye to somebody one is unlikely to ever see again. Time rolls on; history reduces everything to so much dust. Elizabeth knows that better than anyone. All her work will be so much ink and precedent one day, flattened down to a footnote, and only her future iterations — those who make the same choices and sacrifices, work the same late nights and laugh at the same bureaucratic jokes — will understand what it really means, the way nothing else in the world matters.

With any luck, they might also give her the benefit of the doubt, the understanding and sympathy afforded a colleague-in-arms without any of the bullshit condescension.

Sometime after midnight, head swimming from wine and exhaustion and the disorienting old-new loneliness of being a single unit once again, Elizabeth goes to bed and tells herself that she won’t bundle up sheets or find an extra pillow to fill the extra space next to her. She turns over until the bed feels less made and more occupied, and then looks at nothing and thinks that it had better be worth it. Whoever she becomes, whatever she gains, had better be worth the agony of realizing how much she’s changed, and how little she noticed, and how fond she almost became of the person she was. Thinking about it is like poking at an empty space in her gum, deeply uncomfortable in a purely cognitive sense. Elizabeth forces herself to do it, to become accustomed to the gap, but all the while she thinks about how easy it would be to take all of it back, if only she went and explained, if she apologized, if she was willing for once to back down and admit that she has no idea what she’s doing or what she wants.

Elizabeth doesn’t know who she would be if she did that, though, if she said aloud, _I’m scared,_ if she didn’t close herself away with her fear in a dark room, alone, to either defeat it or let it win and change her into someone who can go on living, dependent on nobody and nothing else to survive.

She thinks she could have learned to be someone else, to find another way, if she was willing to put the time and work into it, time and work and most of all trust, and there lies the problem. Elizabeth’s capacity for trust encompasses the professional variety — because she knows she can weather any betrayal of that kind — and to a certain extent the personal variety, as well, but not the kind that involves being known. At the end of the day, alone, in the dark, all Elizabeth has to depend on is herself, the few traits that separate her from every other suit on Capitol Hill, whatever it is that makes her worthwhile, better, different. Whatever it is that has survived fear and hurt and loneliness and what feels like several lifetimes of work, whatever makes her untouchable — Elizabeth is nothing without it, and she’s given away too much of herself already, come too close to being somebody she never thought she would be, having something she never thought she would want.

She stares at the ceiling, the too-close darkness, and thinks that it has to be worth it, because the rejected opportunity is too sharp, too broken, for Elizabeth to go anywhere near it for a long, long time. If it isn’t worth it, then what is; how will she ever know again? It has to be, it has to mean something; they have to win, or Elizabeth will be lost.

 

* * *

 

They lose the White House after one term.

Elizabeth endures it, because she doesn’t know how to do anything else, and in the back of her head it rings like a drumbeat: five prior incumbents who ran for re-election and couldn’t hack it, and the sixth was on her watch. She turns over one disjointed thought, again and again, as if she can wear away its sharp edges by sheer repetition: the number was enough to count on one hand, and now it takes two. The phrasing is off; a good speechwriter might be able to turn it around, but Elizabeth is not inclined towards stylized oratory. She prefers to stand backstage rather than behind the podium. Nevertheless there must be some way, she thinks, to make it a palatable sentence, a talking point she could trot out in interviews and put away afterwards. There must be some way to wipe up the blood and smooth over the bone and wait for scar tissue to form over the entire mess.

Election Night does not bear thinking about. A slow death, a gradual upending of hope: Elizabeth puts that away too, because she has other concerns, because there are still months to go before January and she intends to make full use of them. There has to be a future — _she_ has to have a future — even if she has no idea what it’ll look like, even if it’s nothing Elizabeth has ever planned for.

Booker wins a third term, solidifying his status as a popular incumbent despite his best efforts to the contrary, and offers to find somewhere for her to go. He does so awkwardly and with the full expectation that Elizabeth will turn him down, so she does, though some small scared part of her wants to say yes, is desperately afraid of never belonging again, of never finding her way back if she strikes out on her own. The greater part is stubborn, and determined to fight her way back to the White House if it takes every breath she has left, if she has to claw the gates down with her bare hands. _You don’t always have to make things so difficult for yourself, Elizabeth,_ Daisy says in the back of her head, but Daisy had left, found some way to live outside the endless cyclical race, got married. Elizabeth sat through the ceremony and half of the reception, and got far too drunk on a combination of champagne and Moscow mules, shoes kicked off under the table and feet kicked up on a chair as she watched the happy couple dancing and did her level best to ignore her phone, and finally Daisy’s new brother-in-law — equally at loose ends, well on his way to sunburnt — had come by and hung Elizabeth’s purse from one of the rented trees lining the tent and goaded her into a perfectly pleasant, unremarkable turn around the dance floor. Elizabeth could never remember his name, and had told him so, candid as a result of too much vodka and the desperate need to remember how to be anything other than so tightly wound she might snap at any moment.

“Robert,” he had told her, as they spun past her table again; Elizabeth kept meaning to break away, and not actually doing so.

“I really am sorry.” She was giddy, too, perhaps, on stolen sunshine and happiness, the unexpected leveling factor of attending an event that had nothing to do with her and was not her responsibility. “I’m usually much better with names.”

“That’s all right,” he said, and his hand on her waist was entirely in line with propriety, though Elizabeth wished it wasn’t. “I’ll keep track for you.”

He had, for a few months, as Elizabeth fielded endless fond mockery from Daisy and accumulated all too much knowledge about what her wife liked — in bed, out of bed, at the bar, at brunch, an endless parade of indignities and unbearable soppiness — and endured enough unsubtle hints that when Robert brought it up in bed (his) one morning, she had rehearsed her response, and could turn him down with at least a modicum of care. At least he hadn’t bought a ring, she told herself afterwards, so he couldn’t have been completely surprised by her reply. He went back to his work, some think tank Elizabeth had never asked or wanted to know about, and she had gone back to hers, and even that hadn’t been enough to save her from heartbreak in the end, the stinging rejection of the institutions and beliefs that served as magnetic north for her entire professional life.

The president-elect is a Democrat, a young one, with good optics and too little history to be dirty. Elizabeth manages the handover bloodlessly, with as much sentiment as a funeral, which is to say none at all; she wears her most frictionless smile and every outfit from the closet she keeps stocked and organized for emergencies, for times when she needs to look put together and won’t have the capacity to manage it on her own. She gets all of it dry-cleaned, and wears it again. She gets up in the morning, and goes to bed before midnight, and spends every waking hour finding something to do, so that she won’t end up alone with her thoughts, and somewhere in the frenzy of it, the knowing self-destruction, the total disorienting sorrow, Elizabeth decides that she does actually want to see the future, after all. She doesn’t want to lie facedown in the reflecting pool until the Capitol police fish her out, and she doesn’t really want to throw the Resolute desk into the Potomac, though the thought is tempting. What Elizabeth discovers, in the midst of her self-imposed seclusion, is that she wants to live with an intensity, a desperation, that comes as a surprise. She wants to fucking live.

She also discovers a newfound tendency for recklessness. One morning, staring at her newly monstrous dark circles in the mirror, a small voice in the back of Elizabeth’s head whispers, _You can’t run for office looking like that, now, can you?_

That first day, Elizabeth ignores the thought, the way it digs tiny claws into her chest cavity and hangs on, but it comes back the next morning, and the morning after that, and again, and six months — six months! — after that, Elizabeth realizes that she’s treating the possibility as a foregone conclusion, accumulating donor lists and voter data and staffing her hypothetical campaign, and fuck if she doesn’t want it so badly she can taste it. To win, to belong in her own right, to stand on her own, to try and have everything she wants instead of surviving on scraps, living on her knees and stealing secondhand victories where she can: to earn that easy confidence of men shaking hands with men, to know that she deserves the same, if not more; to prove it.

She gets to work.

Elizabeth does what she does best and runs herself into the ground, hiring staffers who will do the same, and she watches internal polls and external polls and even Rasmussen, and she holds so many public events that she acquires handshake calluses. She ruins three pairs of heels before the end of the year, makes her peace with statement jewelry, and bids a resentful farewell to her pencil skirts in favor of dresses with square necklines. She hires and fires three personal assistants, because none of them are half as good at the job as Elizabeth would have been in their place, and then her campaign manager promotes an intern — presumably as cosmic punishment for both of them — whose ponytail and taste for florals conceal the most mercenary personality Elizabeth has ever met outside a lobbyist networking dinner, and then Elizabeth has to promote her. She does a number of moderately successful ads, and one ill-conceived Twitter forum before her social media manager puts a blanket ban on live online events and gives Elizabeth a well-intentioned and entirely unnecessary explanation of the character limit, which is the most humiliating experience of her political life.

And then, just over a year later, she wins: in Maryland’s 3rd district, against the odds. She wins. It feels different, at once smaller and larger than winning somebody else the White House, and Elizabeth drinks flat champagne out of a red plastic cup and feels newly, firmly rooted; more grounded than she has in years, in the rest of her life, maybe. She watches the interns getting sloppily drunk on vending machine snacks and Labatt Blue, a terrible acquired taste that one of the pollsters spread to the rest of the champagne, and feels old and tired and sure of herself, more comfortable than she can ever recall being before.

She stays just late enough to make sure everyone has been thanked, makes the office rounds to be sure nobody will actually throw up in a file box, and leaves her staffers to their celebrations. Elizabeth knows better than to think she can fit in. Once again she is alone, separate by dint of her own decisions and experiences, out beyond known space; once again she has put herself beyond the sphere of normalcy, removed herself from even the possibility.

In January, Elizabeth smiles through her swearing-in, and squares her shoulders against the cameras. Kitten heels no longer cramp her calves, and pearls no longer feel like a stranglehold. She no longer stumbles through long-winded answers or grits her teeth through speeches. She has an office in the Rayburn building and a great deal to learn and, to her surprise, more ambition than she thought possible.

Elizabeth finds that she has a taste for victory. She also spends more time than she’d like to think about staring at the congressional directory, and not paging through it. It becomes a point of pride, and an obstinate mental block. Time stretches out, in Washington, every hour filled to the brim and then some, so two years — three? Three, Elizabeth realizes, at least, though it feels like so much more — should be more than enough time to erode any lingering awkwardness. She should pick up the phone and invite him to coffee, to a meeting, anything so that the first time they see each other again isn’t a surprise, a chance meeting at next year’s State of the Union. She should stop being so damn nervy about it, Elizabeth thinks, because what’s left for her to be afraid of?

She makes it to May before finding out. As summer’s heat and humidity begin to settle over the city, Elizabeth takes to leaving for the office early in order to walk a few blocks in the bearable morning hours of daylight, and so she runs into him smoking on the terrace of the Longworth building — _Still?_ she thinks — and then it hits her, so hard that it’s like a physical blow to the chest. He looks just the same, if older and more tired, and she misses him suddenly, wants to take back all the hurt she’s ever caused him, give back all the wasted time. Instead, she approaches him slowly, as if he might startle, and waits.

“It’s quieter up here,” Booker says finally, not looking at her. “Nobody comes out this early.”

He has a long walk back to his office, Elizabeth knows, and very little time to waste, and yet he offers her a cigarette.

“No, thank you,” she says, because she’s trying to avoid picking up old bad habits all over again, but after a moment she adds: “But I’ll split yours.”

The sun inches upwards, and the cigarette burns down, and finally Elizabeth offers it to Booker to finish. “You’ll be late,” she says.

He grinds it out. “Guess so.”

“But,” she says, as he turns away, a helpless outburst, a hiccup of inadvertent honesty. “Would you — we should—” She stops, puts her words in order, grounds herself. “I’d like to get coffee,” she says. “Or drinks.” _Or dinner._ “If you want. Whenever works for you.”

His face moves very little, but he looks at her for a long moment, and then he says, “I’d like that,” and something begins to unfold beneath Elizabeth’s ribs, some dense tightly compressed mass unfurling for the first time in years.

 _The hope is what kills you,_ she thinks, in those last moments before it washes through her, and then it does, and leaves her buoyant and lost.

 

* * *

 

They get coffee, eventually — it takes a few days for Elizabeth to collect herself enough to stop overthinking the details; old habits die hard — and then she wins a second term, which is more or less as long as it takes for her to ask him to drinks. For propriety’s sake, according to the new rules she has adopted for her new self, those have to come with dinner. Elizabeth finds that she is no longer in a rush to know everything, to make up all the lost time and space between them. She prefers to mean what she says, to meander without worrying that she’ll miss something or run out of time. As she stirs sugar into her coffee, Elizabeth discovers that she has enjoyed herself, and that she would like to do so again.

It takes her most of another term to turn that over in her mind, eclipsed by growing dissatisfaction with her congressional role, and by the time Elizabeth says anything about it she is packing up her office, file boxes ready to be shipped back to Baltimore, Booker slotted in amongst them like a fixture.

“You should run for governor,” he says, new gravel to his voice as there is to hers, new weight likewise to their posture, though Elizabeth carries it with slightly more grace.

Backwards and in high heels, she thinks, and wonders if she should keep her Washington lease, just in case. “I don’t think so.”

“Comes with a mansion.”

“Name the last five governors of Maryland and any significant accomplishment,” she says. “By any of them.”

“And Agnew doesn’t count?” he says.

“Agnew resigned.” She goes through her desk drawers for the second time.

“Not the governorship,” Booker says, but there’s a laugh hidden underneath.

She smiles, a little. “No.”

He nods. “Governorship isn’t a bad launchpad.”

“Not bad isn’t good enough,” she says, and he laughs outright at that.

“That sounds more like you,” he says, and Elizabeth isn’t startled to realize that it does. She is familiar with herself, forgiving, in a way that she never knew was possible.

Back home, working out of a gutted, remodeled building that houses three nonprofits, a photography studio, and more exposed piping than any office should feature, Elizabeth spends a year working on redistricting initiatives, the kind of photogenic hot-button activism that won’t make for good attack ads. She learns a lot in a very short amount of time about down-ballot candidates who might present a challenge in the next few years, and even more about which local offices need funding for their ground game, and state-specific technicalities when it comes to ballot initiatives. She also learns that most people, besides Californians, could not care less about referendums.

She makes herself wait another year, to see how the landscape is shifting and to let any sea change run its course, and goes moderately viral when Time runs a series of interviews with former campaign managers as the latest round of primaries wind to a nasty, backstabbing, mud-slinging close. Elizabeth hasn’t worked in the White House in a decade, but it comes back in a rush, lights up behind her eyelids like the deep-sea luminescence that comes just before sleep, and when she reads the epithet _one-time wunderkind_ in serif font next to her name it doesn’t tear her up the way it once did.

Midterms come and go. Booker has another two years before his card is up again, and Elizabeth has no doubt that he could win another term, could put together yet another unpolished war machine of a campaign and defend against all comers, but he would be wasted. She knows it, and thinks that he must too, but she begins putting together an operation of her own anyway to gauge public opinion. A Senate campaign as a distraction, as a test balloon: if Elizabeth had thought of it any earlier, it would have been hubris of the worst kind. Because she is older and less untested, she thinks that at worst it might be arrogance; at best, it might be reasonable.

Another six months in, she calls Booker.

He has a number of opinions, most of which are that she needs someone younger, more ambitious, more hungry, better; he has a number of excuses, all of which she rejects; and after hours of halfhearted argument and sincere invective, when he goes quiet at last, she says, “For God’s sake, I’m not asking you to marry me.”

“No,” he says, “you’re asking me to _run your campaign for president._ That _matters._ ”

“And marriage doesn’t?” Elizabeth says, because she could recite that particular talking point in her sleep, but she understands what he means. “I know, Booker. That’s why I’m asking you.”

“Absolutely not,” he says, in a tone that suggests he already regrets it, and hangs up.

He calls her back ten minutes later to say: “And don’t hire Fontaine, the man’s a liar and an incompetent.”

Fifteen minutes after he hangs up, Booker adds via text: _And a brute._

When her phone lights up again with his caller ID, Elizabeth picks up and says, “You know, you may as well take the job.”

“Elizabeth,” he says, pleading, and she says:

“You know there’s nobody I trust more.”

For a long moment, Elizabeth watches the second hand of her watch tick nearly a full circle, and then he says, “I know.”

“Thank you,” she says, and lets out her breath.

“What do you need?” he says.

 _A good right hand,_ Elizabeth thinks. _An attack dog, a snarl, a shield; someone to keep the wolves from my door; someone to be the wolf. A rock to remain steady, a sturdy place to stand, a time bomb wired to my heartbeat. A hired gun, a tame beast, someone to hand me the knife and stand aside, someone to watch my back. Someone to stand behind me and beside me. Not justice, but a sword._

Instead, she smiles, and takes a deep breath, and tells him.

 

* * *

 

Elizabeth expects it to be hard; she knows it wouldn’t be worth it otherwise, but it still comes as a surprise. The long hours, the instant feeding frenzy when she formally announces her candidacy, the early stumbling blocks — “It’s not something you get to practice,” Booker says, and it’s April again, his birthday come and gone without fanfare, hers a distant memory only a month ago. The time passes that quickly, an endless slide away from her, and it seems only yesterday that Elizabeth was twenty-something and agonizingly young to boot, trying desperately to perform a kind of uncertainty that had never suited her. By the same metric, she will be gone in only minutes, scattered on the breeze.

“But I should be better at it,” she says, because campaigning is not new to her. Being a candidate might be, but she should already be good at it; she should be able to land on her feet, despite the uncertain terrain, the shifting gravity. The challenge is exhilarating, the moment-to-moment nature of the race, a marathon run at a sprint, but Elizabeth feels like she’s aging a year for every day. Every time she reaches what she thinks must be the limits of her endurance, she is tested again, and discovers new depths of exhaustion and — to match — a resilience that feels fundamental.

The primaries wind down finally, thank God, a field of unremarkable and promisingly mediocre candidates winnowed down to three, then two, and then in May the last career dilettante drops out and goes back to the Senate with his tail between his legs and Elizabeth is left standing. The circus of debates is already a distant memory and the convention is coming up and something about that catches in Elizabeth’s throat, stupidly, something about the thought of standing alone and making her case to a crowd hungry for belief, desperate for a cause.

They spend a long time on the speech. Two staffers consume enough energy drinks to run a small power plant, and attack the English language from every angle possible and a few they formulate specifically to cause Elizabeth anguish; for her part, she goes through three complete rough drafts and several thousand fragmentary ones, and by the time June rolls around she’s dreaming in sound bites and generating them over coffee, in the shower, while trying to fall asleep. She jolts awake every few minutes until midnight with a new idea, a new turn of phrase, or worst of all an edit — by the end of the month, she has a rotation of legal pads next to her bed, which she switches out as they fall behind the headboard or get appropriated and never returned by one of the speechwriters, whose blood has surely been replaced entirely by caffeine.

The campaign is like a long, endless dress rehearsal, like running through the wings and the hallways backstage and playing hide-and-seek in the tech room. It comes with the same effervescent sense of play, the same self-aware theatrics and indulgent absurdity. Elizabeth says so to Booker one morning, as they wait for the only functional coffee machine to finish its three-century-long descaling process and produce something potable. “Never did much theater myself,” he says, digging his thumbs into his eyes. Elizabeth sympathizes; if the Miele isn’t done in the next two seconds, she might start eating unground beans.

“Me neither,” she says, because she hadn’t, but she’d always wanted to take part in the easy camaraderie of the show, the giddy irreverence. Debate had been as close as she’d gotten. “Do you ever worry that it’s all become a game to us? Just another way to keep score, wins and losses.” She digs her heel into the carpet. “Who’s up, who’s down.”

“No,” he says, without hesitation. “I mean, sure, maybe. But worrying seems like half the battle.”

The Miele makes a profoundly unhappy noise. Both of them stare at it, balefully.

“I mean, I could never do it,” Booker goes on, after the machine subsides into sulky silence. “No question, I’d get it wrong. But I’m not the one running.” He shrugs. “So no, I don’t worry.”

“I swear to God if that thing isn’t working I’m going to gut it for parts,” May says, appearing next to Elizabeth, completely oblivious to anything but the siren song of caffeine and her Twitter analytics. Elizabeth moves over to make room for her to glare at the machine as well. “Who started the cleaning cycle without giving everyone a two-hour warning?”

“It’s nine in the morning,” Elizabeth points out. “You weren’t here two hours ago.”

“I might have been,” May says, but she leans up against the counter and slumps down until she’s barely vertical. “Maybe I live here now.”

Elizabeth snorts. “You think this is bad, you haven’t seen anything yet,” she says. “Just wait until debates.”

The debates are sheer misery, except for the actual night of; Elizabeth enjoys the challenge, and the excuse to perform competence, but she hates the rehearsals and the prep work and the production of the entire thing. CNN puts up a countdown clock a full day in advance, and then puts up a countdown clock to the start of its own coverage, and then reverts to an even more apocalyptic version of the original. By the time Elizabeth steps out onstage she is irrationally convinced that the numbers are actually ticking down to her own death, but she takes a deep breath and lets the tension drain from her shoulders and jaw and remembers the roar from the convention floor, the thunder of applause, the way she forgot about everything else for a moment and knew that she could do it. She could win.

The countdown hits zero, and she remembers how to fly.

Afterwards, when the designated sacrificial lambs have been dispatched to spin alley and the networks have propped up their most valuable talking heads to pick apart every nuance of word choice and body language and Brian Williams is making mild amends for all his past sins, Elizabeth collapses into a car, every muscle gone liquid with exhaustion.

“I hope it gets easier,” she says, only half-joking.

It doesn’t. Elizabeth has a store of good moments and happy memories, and by October she has picked their bones clean in search of a way to keep herself human. She resorts to reading novels her staffers buy in airports, the kind with shiny covers and newsprint pages and bold covers designed to look impressive when read in waiting areas, and then she gives up on reading entirely and spends all her time thinking instead, and sometime in the middle of the month — one debate left, a two-week-long final push to Election Day, final rally dates as close to set in stone as they’ll ever be — she reaches a sort of crescendo of nerves, white-knuckling a pen and staring at nothing as the night winds to a close.

When Booker comes to find her, she says, unplanned and unprompted: “Why am I here?” Her pent-up frustration and anguish spills out like overflow, a dam breaking, the sea pouring in. She takes a breath, and it doesn’t help. She takes another, and it chokes her and comes back up. “They’re going to pull me apart,” she says, voice low and desperate. “Why did I do this, if I was so smart, if I wanted to do something, why this?”

He waits a moment, and then says: “Instead of what?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know. Anything. Not this.”

“And you’d be happy?” he asks.

“Am I happy now?” she says, but the answer to both questions is _no_ , because she isn’t built for happiness. It makes her unsure and uneasy; it blunts her sharp edges and leaves her ineffective and discontent. “I don’t know,” she says again, and then, on impulse, because nobody has asked him in years: “Booker — do you believe in God?”

She turns his answer over in her mind for a long, long time.

 

* * *

 

She gives a speech on election eve, a good speech, one from the heart, in front of thousands of people, and afterwards Elizabeth wishes she still remembered how to cry. Instead, she goes home to her house — though it feels like just another hotel room — and opens a bottle of wine at random and tries to sleep, though her heart is hammering against her ribs, though she thinks she might go out of her mind before the morning.

In the middle of the night, really the early hours of the morning, she rouses — gradually at first and then with a jolt of adrenaline that jerks her upright — and realizes that her phone is ringing.

She picks up, and waits.

“What do you need?” Booker says.

“Why?” she asks.

For a heartbeat she thinks that the line has gone dead, and then he says: “It’s yours. You know that. Whatever you need, whatever you want. My life, my loyalty; you had it before you ever asked, before I ever knew. No matter what happens tomorrow, all of it, it’s yours. So tell me — what do you need?”

“Don’t leave me,” Elizabeth says, whispering down the line, fawn-footed on the threshold of the future. “Please don’t leave me here.” The sentiment is almost too fragile to express, an insubstantial nothing of a wish, but the sky is just beginning to lighten and the leaves are turning and winter will come soon, cold and dark and clear, and she needs to say it. She needs to have said it, before the world changes, before it loses its meaning and is swept into the past.

He says nothing, just stays on the line, and after a long time, when Elizabeth thinks he must have fallen asleep, he says — quiet and low — “Never.”

 

* * *

 

“Europe,” he says.

Elizabeth frowns. “Asia.”

“Continental Europe,” Booker retorts, holding her coat open.

“Establish our commitment to maintaining recent diplomatic and economic agreements,” she says, tying the belt.

He steps away. “Remind old allies of our long-standing relationships.”

“Beijing,” Elizabeth says.

Booker inclines his head and offers his arm. “Paris,” he says, and she almost misses a step.

“Booker.”

He leads her to the door. “It’s almost time.”

The day is cold and bright and clear, a perfect January morning. A car is waiting on Pennsylvania Avenue. Booker will meet her on the steps of the Capitol and walk beside her into the future.

Elizabeth Comstock is president-elect of the United States. There are only a handful of people alive with the necessary traits and referents to understand her; she is singular; she is solitary. In less than an hour, she will take the oath of office, and become even more so.

 

* * *

 

It’s noon. The sun is high.


End file.
